IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/h/pal/palchp/978-0-230-10223-1_11.html
   My bibliography  Save this book chapter

Competition Policy

In: Economic Freedom and the American Dream

Author

Listed:
  • Joseph Shaanan

Abstract

A long-held belief, going back to Thomas Jefferson, is that competition is necessary to prevent individuals or organizations from infringing on the economic liberties of others or undermining the freedom of the system.1 A genuinely competitive free market economy has a built-in mechanism for preventing the rise of economic power through decentralized decision making of numerous economic units. Yet in the laissez faire environment of the past 30 years, competition and its protection have been relegated to a lesser role often in the name of economic efficiency It would appear that when corporations’ freedom to profit is paramount, the importance of protecting competition becomes secondary, for all intents and purposes. Can competition survive in a completely laissez-faire environment? A competitive market’s existence is not guaranteed and can be destroyed by its participants3 so that laissez-faire does not ensure optimal economic performance.4 Without competition, the public risks facing monopolies and cartels. Economic freedom without a modicum of public supervision may lessen market competition as well as other freedoms.5 Specifically, in the context of the current framework, unrestricted freedom of corporations to profit by circumventing the market endangers both individual economic freedom and the freedom of markets.

Suggested Citation

  • Joseph Shaanan, 2010. "Competition Policy," Palgrave Macmillan Books, in: Economic Freedom and the American Dream, chapter 0, pages 137-152, Palgrave Macmillan.
    • Handle: RePEc:pal:palchp:978-0-230-10223-1_11
    DOI: 10.1057/9780230102231_11
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:pal:palchp:978-0-230-10223-1_11. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.palgrave.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.